Jewelweed Page 13

  He inched beyond the driveway and backed the tractor-trailer down the drive, between the house and his pickup. The motion detectors on the side of the porch failed to turn on the lights. They’d quit working last winter.

  Nate turned the ignition key back toward him and the diesel’s rattling vibration died; the wipers collapsed at the bottom of the windshield. With competition from the engine gone, the rain beat more boldly, washing away memories of intersections, flashing lights, merging lanes of traffic, exit signs, blasting horns, public restrooms, and loading docks. The liquid drumming coaxed his muscles toward a yearned-for resignation. The trunks of the trees in the yard trembled in the storm; their limbs flailed.

  On the front of his house a waterfall rolled off the sagging, leaf-clogged gutters, and he thought about marching into the deluge, unlocking the door, clambering inside, and dripping all over the floor—greeted by walls, doorways, and pictures that always seemed to resent late-night intrusions, and to hold grudges every time he was gone this long.

  Nate shut off the running lights and the rain beat even louder in the surrounding darkness. Somewhere overhead, lightning split open the sky, gulped a lungful of wet air, and roared. The decision was made: he liked sleeping in the truck during thunderstorms. He liked it even more than the promise of a hot shower and clean sheets.

  In the bunk in back, Nate listened contentedly to the rain and the popping sounds of the engine shrinking under the hood in the cooling air. With each crack of lightning and clap of thunder, crooked veins of water flashed against the window. Sleep came closer, stalking his imagination, coaxing his attention toward descending spirals of fainting pleasure.

  Tomorrow, Nate knew, the preacher woman and her husband were going to the prison to talk about Blake’s work release. Also tomorrow, Nate was going to the cement plant in Red Plain to see his cousin Bee. As he imagined the reunion, excitement collided with fear, and to free himself from the anxiety he concentrated again on the sound of rain. He thought about his rain-loving garden behind the house, sprouted from rain-loving seeds—tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, arched-neck squash, pumpkins, potatoes, and sweet corn. He imagined picking a ripe tomato sometime later in the summer, presenting it to Bee—her hands reaching, curling, tightening, lifting it to her mouth, biting through the skin, her tongue in the juice—and fell into a watery sleep.

  New light and quarreling squirrels woke him early. It had stopped raining. Several small birds hopped with scratching sounds on the roof of the cab, bathing in a six-year-old dent filled with rainwater—a present from a couple of kids in Kentucky who’d dropped a brick from an overpass.

  Trying not to disturb the morning, Nate quietly opened the door, lowered his bad leg out of the cab, and stepped onto the soaked, squishing lawn. A shallow fog roamed knee-high over the ground, the air above crystal clear. From beneath the horizon, the sun burnished the rounded edges of several low-lying clouds, and the early light found drops of water hanging from grape leaves along the trellis, tiny stars gold-burning inside them. A slanting strand of spider-silk drifted silently across the front yard, a cast-off ladder to another realm.

  The drawn-out lament of a mourning dove stretched the dawn further and Nate thought about his son. Would Blake have forgotten mornings like these? Would forgetting make them harder to find?

  No, Nate assured himself. Mornings like these would rise through the deepest forgetting. They needed no introduction, no endorsement; they simply announced themselves. You had to find yourself inside one, watch your thoughts effortlessly rising into radiance, and join the celebration.

  Behind the house, his garden glistened in wet light. The mulched rows oozed when walked on, exuding a damp, rich, fecund smell. Small green tomatoes had already set on—beefsteak and heirloom. They dangled haphazardly from their vines like ornaments waiting for Christmas. The zucchini—true to their nature—had puffed up to many times their size since he’d last seen them, and were now too bold, too proud to hide beneath the green leaves.

  The mourning dove called again and Nate’s eyes followed the sound east, past his beehives and across his neighbor’s small pasture, where two Angus steers loitered next to an old water tank. On an outcropping of sandstone at the edge of the treeline, a lone boy stood. He watched Nate silently from beside a stand of scrub oak and birch. His weathered face and hands looked as brown as branches.

  Nate instinctively recognized the Wild Boy. They looked at each other and the shared exchange seemed to Nate like that of two men who had long ago learned to be wary of others, communicating cautious goodwill through separate solitudes. Nate couldn’t tell for sure what the boy was wearing, but his watchful expectancy seemed to be from a different time and place.

  Without looking away, Nate crouched and plucked an early cabbage—a prize, without blemish. Holding it dripping and cool in front of him, he walked slowly through his backyard. The boy continued to watch him from the other side of the pasture. Nate set the cabbage on a wood post at the corner of the fence and backed away. The boy’s gaze followed.

  Nate tried to hold the cherished sight of the boy before him without any distracting thoughts, to fix the image clearly in his mind. Several years ago he’d seen—or at least imagined he saw—this boy running through a forest closely bordering the road. It was only a fleeting glimpse, and at dusk, but the memory immediately rose to a prominent position in his mind. Then about a year later, while climbing into his truck outside a restaurant on the edge of the reserve, he saw a quick, darting movement, something child-shaped sprinting into the cover of foliage along the edge of a field. The solitary movement was as different from other children’s as the movement of a coyote from that of a house pet.

  When Nate told his son about seeing a wild boy, Blake’s face lit up like candle. It was the first time Nate had seen him smile since he was sent to prison. Later, when Nate told him about the second time he’d seen the boy running along the edge of a field, Blake laughed. “No kidding? Do you really think that’s what you saw, Dad? Really?”

  Nate asked about the Wild Boy throughout the Ocooch, even in places where the Driftless Region sprawled over into Minnesota and Iowa. “Have you ever heard of a wild boy living somewhere around here? Do you know anyone who has seen him?”

  Mostly, no one had heard of him. Some said they’d seen footprints and other signs, but hadn’t thought much about them. Others said they wouldn’t be at all surprised if a wild child was living somewhere in the Driftless. Connected tracts of forest, abundant freshwater, and deep pockets of human poverty seemed conducive to such a phenomenon. Some local historians he talked to were reminded of years ago, when “hidden in the Ocooch” had been a common phrase referring to members of the Ho-chunk Nation (People of the Big Voice), who had escaped their desolate reservation in South Dakota and illegally returned to the lush land they had been driven from.

  But no, they hadn’t seen a wild boy, and neither had anyone else he met. Only Lester Mortal, a recluse living in a melon field miles from town—he’d seen him, Nate heard. Yes, Lester had seen him. Three people were sure of that.

  Nate once talked to a woman working in a Luster grocery store who had heard from her neighbor about a couple of men in Chicago who owned four hundred acres of recreational land. They auctioned off deer-hunting rights to the highest bidders, and to advertise the sporting opportunity they collected pictures of trophy bucks taken by video cameras placed on their property. One of the motion-activated camcorders had captured a brief woodland scene of a deer with a boy standing next to it. The quality was poor, but the image clearly showed a boy and a deer standing next to each other, then moving together out of the frame. Several weeks later, all their cameras disappeared.

  Because their property bordered Lester’s along one valley, they carried the video over to the recluse and showed it to him. They asked if he knew anything about their missing camcorders. After looking at the image of the boy with the deer, Lester reportedly stood up from the table in his hut, walked ove
r to a nearby cabinet, pulled a double-barreled shotgun from the rack, broke it open, shoved two shells in, locked it closed, cocked both hammers, and set the gun on the table. “Jesus said for his disciples to shake the dust off their sandals,” he said, “and I think you’d better leave now.” Fully satisfied that the old veteran belonged in an institution with barred windows, they left.

  After hearing this story, Nate followed the narrow path littered with cans and bottles to where Lester lived. Before Nate reached the sod hut, however, the veteran came out and stood in front of the open door. “Leave me alone, goddamn you!” he screamed, his voice cracking-shrill, hair leaping from his face and head like black flames. “Leave me alone, Nathaniel Bookchester, leave me alone.” An ancient Browning automatic rifle rested in the crook of an arm and he yelled again. “The angels of heaven sing and the chorus is always the same. Go to hell, Bookchester.”

  Nate returned without talking to him. Then he went to the Words Repair Shop to see Jacob Helm. People said Jacob knew more about Lester Mortal than anyone else, and apparently he had helped the returning veteran buy the piece of land he lived on. Jacob had even taken some time off when Lester needed help building his house, and, some said, loaned him tools, equipment, and money. And on several occasions when the old veteran had issues with his neighbors or county zoning agents, Jacob had smoothed things over.

  But when Nate asked Jacob about Lester, he said very little. And when he asked about the Wild Boy, Jacob just shook his head and said, “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “As near as I can tell,” Nate said, “that child showed up at about the same time that Lester came back here.”

  “Like I said,” replied Jacob, “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “But you’re not saying there isn’t a wild child out there somewhere?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” said Jacob.

  Two other people had been listening to their conversation: Jacob’s son, August, and a tourist from Minneapolis who was lost and had stopped for directions, his wife’s grayish-blue shadow waiting behind the tinted glass in the passenger-side window. August studied his father without saying anything, but the man from Minneapolis thought the idea of a wild boy was preposterous. And when Nate explained that he’d seen him, the man became almost apoplectic, as if Nate had insulted him personally.

  This wasn’t the first time Nate had run into this attitude. Some people, he’d discovered, simply did not want to believe that the Wild Boy existed. In fact, they scoffed at the very idea of wildness. Just thinking about it made them angry. For these people, well-ordered, efficient, and productive habits were mandatory. Children could not live without help and supervision. They had to be protected from nature’s realities. Civilization made childhood possible, and while groups of feral children might exist from time to time around unfenced urban dumps in third-world countries, they could not exist in nature.

  Nate easily dismissed these people. They were usually the same folks who owned heated garages. Something about keeping their cars warm seemed to kill a vital agency inside them. First, a false realization of their own importance had dulled their natural senses until they no longer heard geese flying at night. Next, they walked without stopping past jewelweed in late-summer bloom, having no time for ditch beauty. And then, finally, heated garages finished them off. Of course they didn’t believe in a boy sleeping in caves and roaming through untended fields, his eyes filled with an ancient shameless wonder. If there were such a child, his untaught contentment would mock everything they had traded their souls for.

  Yet here he was—wild as life. Put that in your garage and heat it, Nate thought, though by the time he emerged from his reflections the boy was gone.

  Nate hurried inside the house and stuffed a canvas bag with a blanket, two pairs of wool socks, an old coat, several bars of soap, scissors, thread, a package of needles, a bottle of aspirin, a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and blackberry jam. He carried it outside and hung it from the post under the cabbage. Just in case the boy was still watching from an unseen location, he waved, turned, and walked away, his steps lighter than before, his leg not hurting at all.

  Inside again, Nate showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, and slept through the rest of the morning, naked between smooth, line-dried sheets.

  That afternoon, he sorted through the mail, paid several bills, cleaned out the eaves and downspouts, carried in clothes from the truck, started a load of laundry, and prepared for his visit to Red Plain. He took a crate of Georgia peaches from the trailer and set them in the kitchen. Next to these he put six pints of Michigan raspberries in balsam-and-wire baskets.

  The phone rang and Nate answered it.

  “Hello, Mr. Bookchester, it’s me, Winnie.”

  “Hello, Reverend Helm,” said Nate, forcing himself to breathe normally.

  “Jacob and I met with the officials at the prison.”

  “How did it go?”

  “It was difficult, but in the end everything was agreed. The papers were signed.”

  “What’s the next step?”

  “We wait. Your son will come home in two weeks. He’ll be working for Jacob and living with you. His release agent will deliver him from the prison. It’s all been approved.”

  “Two weeks,” repeated Nate, forcing himself to stop holding the telephone like a hatchet.

  “Yes. Blake will be out in two weeks. There will be restrictions—way too many, in my opinion—and his release officer will be most exacting in their enforcement. The slightest infraction will trigger a revocation of his release and he’ll be sent back to prison.”

  The preacher continued, her voice hurried, rising, “But I’m sure there’ll be no trouble. Everything will be fine. You’ll see, Mr. Bookchester. Blake’s finally getting out of that horrid place. The cruelty he’s experienced will soon seem like a bad dream. Everything will be fine.”

  “Call me Nate, Reverend Helm.”

  After hanging up, Nate sat in his living room and looked at his hands. A secret sense of well-being sprang to life inside him and he fought against it. Such brave delight should not be set loose without some assurance, and Nate didn’t have sufficient authority to assure himself of anything. The felicity burgeoning inside him seemed so reckless, so groundlessly naive, so desperately wished for. It wasn’t right. And on top of that, Nate didn’t trust people who called him Mr. Bookchester. It meant they didn’t know him, didn’t understand that most things he’d desperately wanted hadn’t worked out very well.

  An hour later, he was still there, grappling with hope and staring at his hands.

  Finding Bee

  Nate’s drive to Red Plain took a little over an hour, an interminably long time for his heightened expectations. Yet when the road curved around the last outcropping before continuing into the haphazard assortment of nine hundred homes and commercial buildings, he didn’t feel sufficiently prepared. Familiar sights on both sides of the street presented a gauntlet of memories, impeding his movement. After Blake’s mother took off, he found a short-distance hauling job with regular hours, and often delivered beer and other supplies to the taverns here. The rooming house where Blake lived when he first moved away from home now had a Room for Rent sign hanging out front. In the old downtown area, one of Nate’s uncles owned a secondhand store, and the side of the building still read Antiques & Treasures in his aunt’s bold red-and-green lettering.

  The cement plant’s sign had been repainted recently. He parked underneath it and entered the office with a quart of raspberries. Pictures of patios and tile samples hung on the wall, and a sagging line of seventy-pound mortar bags led away from the door. A woman was seated behind the counter. She was wearing a tan short-sleeve blouse, buttoned up the front. Her fingers frolicked over a computer keyboard as she stared into the monitor. She glanced quickly at Nate. “Be right with you.” Then she stood up and carried several papers into a back room, her skirt falling behind her calves, her shoes somewhere between brown,
tan, and maroon. An unseen fax machine hummed, dialed, whistled, and beeped. When she came back, the telephone rang and she picked up the receiver. Nate slid the basket of raspberries onto the counter and shifted his weight from his right leg.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, hanging up. “Everyone wants things done yesterday. How can I help you?”

  “Bee, I’m Nathaniel, your cousin.”

  She lowered her glasses along the ridge of her nose and looked over them. “No you’re not.”

  “I’m pretty sure I am.”

  They looked at each other more carefully.

  Unable to discover the Bee he remembered, Nate panicked. He tried to match his memory’s picture with the person in front of him, but it didn’t fit. Taking a deep breath, he tried again to rediscover her, and with each failure he encountered inner weakness. He followed the curves in her face and studied her neck, the tiny earrings, and the streaks of gray in her short brown hair. All these features led to her eyes, blue-green-and-brown irises with lively, almost-black centers. Holding these glistening planets in front of him, he tried again to fit his memory’s stubborn image to her living form. Again he failed, and his soul withered inside him, like someone returned from war to discover that the sacred place of his childhood was gone.

  Then a dimple caved into her chin as she smiled, and his joy launched. Bee lived, and from this glad discovery came feelings he feared he’d outgrown. Visions of youth seeped into his mind, recollections of more wonderful things than he had time to recall—tumbling scenes peopled with beauty and enchantment, and standing in the middle of them, the person before him.

  “Bee,” he uttered softly.

  “You’re older, Natie,” she said.

  “I brought some raspberries.”

  Again the dimple winked from her chin, engaging an even more satisfying level of familiarity—Bee’s extra portion. As a girl, this characteristic had seemed like a protective coating, a genetic guarantee that her knees would never be knobby. But in its present form it was clearly not that at all. Rather, something better-than, an infectious merriment, a double helping. Something that could never be defined in her overflowed in him and filled his conscious container to the brim with clear and untroubled ambitions. In her company he felt good about himself, better than anywhere else. She licensed him, loaned him the rightful authority to be himself. With Bee, the memories of his family became memories of their shared family, and they were no longer hard to carry. Her presence taught him where to find the right dramas and how to discard the rest. Through her dimpled smile he could stare into the future without blinking.